Coalescing
by Everlark Pearl
Summary: Written for Prompts in Panem Round 3: Day 3 - These were the voices I heard, real life infiltrating my dream, coalescing two worlds that are forever forbidden to meet. Visual Prompt: The beach house.


_There are still moments when he clutches the back of a chair and hangs on until the flashbacks are over. I wake screaming from nightmares of mutts and lost children._

_The sound of waves crashing upon a shore in the distance interrupts my thoughts, drowning out the words that I seem to be watching myself speak from afar._

_So after, when he whispers, "You love me. Real or not real?" I tell him, "Real."_

_I smell salty ocean air. A man chuckles somewhere close, but no matter where I look, I can't find him. All I see are visions of Peeta and me that look unrecognizable. My hair, charred and uneven. His leg, metal and scarred. Both of our bodies riddled with burns. I struggle to remember what happened to us._

_My arm reaches out and I find myself grabbing for the sheets that are wrapped around our bodies. The harder I try, the further away I seem to get, until the room fades completely and I am suddenly standing in the middle of a beautiful meadow. The lush, green grass tickles my bare feet. The bright yellow tops of dandelions scattered around the area dance in the light breeze._

_My children, who don't know they play on a graveyard._

_A little girl laughs, but it's not the little girl I am looking at playing in the meadow. My head whips around to find her, but like the chuckling man, she cannot be found, and soon her voice fades into a distant echo. It's as though I'm playing a game of hide and seek and I don't now who I'm looking for._

"Watch me, Daddy!"_ a little boy shrieks. I turn around again. Nothing. He giggles and whoops triumphantly as the sound of clapping begins to ring out through the meadow._

"That's awesome, buddy!"_ a man's voice echoes. That's Peeta's voice, I'd know it anywhere. But this Peeta that I'm looking at now still isn't speaking. He stares off in the distance at the children as the little girl dances and the small boy, younger than our own, waddles through the grass unsteadily before falling backward onto his bottom._

_"Peeta?" I ask timidly, walking toward his silent form. But he doesn't move. He doesn't even look at me when I call for him two, three more times, my voice growing more and more frantic with each attempt._

_"Katniss?"_

_I hear him. His voice reverberates loudly and pounds against my skull. It's all I hear now, his voice, but it's distant, ethereal. Just out of my grasp._

_Something grabs at me. Shakes me. Yells my name louder than ever, but as I turn around in that meadow, there is nothing touching me. And then it's all ripped away and for a moment, I am thrown into impossible darkness. My arms fly out at my sides and I claw at the air, hitting something with my fingers. I grab at it and feel the familiar warmth of sun soaked skin against my palm._

My eyes flutter open quickly and I look around, struggling to focus my eyes as the white hot sun beams down from where I lay. My hand comes into focus first, grabbing at Peeta's shoulder, clawing almost.

"Hey," he says alarmed, grabbing my wrist to steady my hand. He furrows his eyebrows in concern and exhales loudly through his nose. "What's wrong?"

I can't speak. Over and over again I look around me, trying to shake the disoriented fuzz from my brain. I dig the heels of my hands into my eyes and attempt to halt the short, gasping breaths that are bellowing from my chest. The vision I see when I pull my hands away brings everything into focus.

Two young children chasing each other on the shore of the beach. My children. The girl in her purple bathing suit, shrieking as she runs away, the messy bun of dark hair piled on top of her head bouncing with her steps. Light freckles dot her nose, and her blue eyes still seem to gleam even at a distance — just like her father's.

The little boy, laughing maniacally as he holds a hermit crab between his small fingers, runs after his sister. His blond curls, so light and golden from the exposure to the sun, recoil after he shakes them out of his eyes.

Their skin is golden, and they navigate the sand without falter. My children, who were raised on this beach. The house behind us that overlooks the ocean is the only home they've ever known. They've never seen a meadow like the one in my dream.

These were the voices I heard, real life infiltrating my dream, coalescing two worlds that are forever forbidden to meet.

"Katniss?"

I turn and look at Peeta who is now staring at me with panic-stricken intensity. His hand grips the orange and white swim trunks that covers his left thigh. My eyes flit down to his legs, both there and intact. No metal, no plastic.

"I just had the strangest dream," I finally say. Strange is an understatement. Dreadful is more accurate.

"What was it about?"

"War. Us."

I didn't think it was possible, but Peeta looks even more confused at my admission. He won't ask, but I can tell that he wants me to tell him about it. As I sit there deep in thought for the next several minutes, the whole dream begins to come back to me. I start my explanation at the beginning.

"The world ended," I begin, my eyes darting around the beach.

"The world ended?" Peeta repeats uncertainly.

"Our world. This world."

I explain Panem to him. The districts, the dictatorship, the poverty, the Hunger Games.

"Wait," Peeta says in disbelief as he gathers our beach chairs. "Kids were sent into an arena to kill each other?"

"Yes. And we were two of them." Peeta doesn't respond, but I can tell by the way he sends the kids running ahead of us as we go back to the house that he wants to hear more.

When I am sure the kids are out of earshot I tell him more. The star crossed lovers facade, the way we incited a rebellion with our actions in the arena and beyond and were put on display for an entire nation.

I can sense that it bothers him. _"Well imagine how I feel," _I think to myself.

Back in the house, we make a quick dinner. Once the kids are seated quietly and eating, I retreat to the balcony. The air is too stuffy in the house, even with every window open. I listen to the waves crashing against the shore and seagulls cawing loudly as they fight for a small morsel of food. Peeta finds me out there and sits next to me, his lips set in a hard line, his eyes filled with concern.

"Was there more?" He asks finally.

I nod tersely. I've only just gotten started.

I tell him about his leg. The wound from the sword so deep, so infected that it almost killed him, and the feast to get the medicine to help him that almost killed me. He looks relieved until I tell him about the mutts. What they looked like, what they represented, and the final blow they delivered to his leg, tearing open the healing wound so badly there was no way to save it. His hand immediately moves to touch the untainted flesh of his left leg. I act like I don't notice.

"And then we had to go back into the arena."

Peeta's eyes widen. "You'd think you were asleep for years with the way this goes on."

"This is where it got confusing," I add. "The second arena was part beach, and for a while, I think I mistook it for home, even though it clearly wasn't." And as I explain to him the monkey muttations, the fog and blood rain, I remember something else that sends a cold shiver straight up my spine. "And then you were captured by The Capitol."

"This dream isn't treating me very well," Peeta grouses. He drags his hand over his face and sighs, and I join in shakily, knowing what I have to tell him next. That his entire family was killed, our entire district obliterated, that he was tortured so severely he couldn't remember his favorite color.

"And when you were finally rescued…" I inhale deeply, taking as much air into my lungs as I can and I hold it for a second. When I exhale, I take the brief clarity to spit out the words. "You forgot you loved me."

"That could never happen," Peeta says indignantly, shaking his head.

"You tried to kill me. Twice."

"Jesus, Katniss," Peeta hisses. "What the hell does this even mean?"

I shake my head, unable to figure out how I could have possibly dreamt something so elaborate and so unsettling in such a short amount of time. But I'm not finished. My heart begins to race as I remember the final details of my dream. The snow, the crowd, the fire — my sister. I feel like I'm drowning as I describe the way she was swallowed by the explosion and fire, taken from me forever.

"I tried to run and save her, but the fire swallowed me up too."

Peeta reaches for my hand and squeezes it, letting me know he's here. "You should call Prim. It may be nice to hear her voice after that," he suggests. "She's fine, you know that, right?"

I nod in understanding. Prim is fine, there were no bombs. They were only in my dream.

"The fire got you, too," I remember.

My eyes sweep his bare chest and arms, and for the first time I realize that each scar I saw on his body in my dream is where he has a tattoo in my waking life. The intricate design that starts on his chest and snakes up over his shoulder and down his arm mirrors the burn scars his body was covered in during the final moments of my dream. This prompts me to look at my own arms, and in place of the scars that were angry and red are colorful works of art instead. The relief I feel is palpable.

"What became of us?" Peeta whispers.

"We went home and made a life together." I tell him everything I remember. Making a memory book, helping each other through our worst moments, falling in love again. Finally, I tell him about the children in the meadow who looked strikingly similar to our own, the way they danced and played on land that held the dead but still looked so happy in their unwitted bliss — so loved.

The uncomfortable silence that follows does nothing to ease my apprehension, and I can feel my throat begin to tighten with the panic of just how real the dream felt as it all washes over me once more.

"Not real, not real, not real," I chant the phrase I heard so many times in my dream under my breath, willing myself to realize that this is my life. A house on this beach overlooking the ocean, children that could swim before they could walk, and a husband that is every bit as strong and charming as he was in my dream, but without all of the heartache. There is no Capitol, no arenas, The Hunger Games do not exist.

"What did you say?" Peeta asks.

I shake my head and look out at the horizon.

"Nothing."


End file.
